Grad school
I lived in the Village of Alfred in western New York for two years, 2004-2006. It was a lonely time at first, being that the school was located in a small, isolated community. But I slowly acclimated, found my people there, and came to view it as a gift of time that was largely uninterrupted by distractions. The program’s best offer, arguably, was access to a broad range of materials and processes. I experimented with glass-blowing, neon, sound art, and various casting methods. Parallel to the school’s many offerings, a revelatory experience was a field trip to NYC to see Tim Hawkinson’s retrospective at the Whitney. The fantastic diversity of his output gave me the freedom to try even more tangential things than before, and to worry less about uniformity in my portfolio.
I graduated from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2006 with an MFA in sculpture.
white whale | 2004
thimble | 2004
cottage grove | 2004
ghost | 2004
forest for the trees | 2005
what goes on | 2005
brainwash | 2005
dyscrasia | 2005 [collaboration with Peter Lutz, Nathan Prouty + John Rugh]
forget-me-knot | 2006
Since the focus of my thesis was on memory—specifically how it becomes embedded/contained in objects—I had an idea about a correlation to clothing: if a person’s wardrobe defines them in some way, perhaps the lost sock phenomenon that we all experience is like the small things we forget here and there. What would a lifetime of these lost memories look like, aggregated into one object? A simple overhand knot seemed like a perfect form to carry this content, since a string around the finger has historically been a mnemonic device, and I liked the meta aspect of socks knotted onto a scaled-up knot framework.
I collected lost socks over a period of a few months to make this piece, recovered from the Alfred laundromat where I did my clothes, and occasionally found on the street (once I was sorry I’d picked up one I found in NYC while on a weekend trip there…)
The maquette for the piece was a bit of knotted rope dipped in plaster that I was able to draw on top of to understand how to translate the solid into a wireframe. On a whim, I stuck it in one corner of the gallery when I installed my thesis show, as an easter egg, but sadly someone stole it at some point during the run of the show…now it is but a memory…
network | 2006
pangaea | 2006
temporary | 2006
toprennerpot | 2006
palimpsest (draft) | 2006
palimpsest (thesis) | 2006